Saturday, January 31, 2015

The Independent Newspaper’s Sue
Hubbard wrote of British artist Chantal Joffe’s portraits
“Her women seem caught in a perpetual struggle both to keep their own counsel
while flirting with the desire to confront and seduce the viewer.”

Joffe is best known for her towering
paintings, some over 10 feet (3.3 meters) high, of women and children where the
power of the feminine shines through the mostly anonymous subjects. About which
she told The
Bloomberg Space’sSacha Craddock “I
don’t want to tell a story; the paintings I like best become abstract at some
level. These are much more factual, much less illusory. No narrative creeps in.”

Occasionally Joffe will work
directly from life or from her own photographs, which about the latter she has
said "I’m a terrible
photographer [...] But in a way, the more the photo is crap, the better to
paint from." But mostly Joffe
uses images from fashion
spreads, ads, and friends’ family snapshots as her inspiration. “When you’re looking through a magazine,
what makes you stop and think is when you see an image and imagine the
narrative that is going on inside of it. Those are the ones I make into
paintings,” she explained to the Interview
Magazine.

Earlier in her
career Joffe also used pornographic imagery as a source material for her work.
About which his told the Guardian
Newspaper “I was
interested in the politics surrounding pornography, but also because I wanted
to paint nudes, and through pornography I had an endless supply of images of
naked women.”

Joffe’s later
works have moved her eye closer to home painting family and friends whether on
seaside holidays or self portraits with her daughter. As she says, “Since
having a child, my paintings are more personal. I wanted to convey some of that
physical intensity that comes with having a baby. The anxiety and emotions are
so visceral.”

Joffe’s current
exhibition Beside the Seaside is
currently on show at Hastings’ Jerwood Gallery until the 12th of
April. Exhibitions are planned for New York and London later in the year.

Friday, January 30, 2015

In 1974 the 27 year
old Faisal Laibi Sahi deemed it prudent to leave Iraq. Saddam Hussein was conducting an anti communist purge and with
his leftist, progressive leanings Sahi elected for caution over valor and
pursued his art studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the
Sorbonne University in France. Since then Sahi has lived in Italy, Algeria and
currently lives and works in London. He may have left Iraq, but Iraq has never
left him. "Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad," he told Newsweek in 2002. "Wherever
I go, I take it with me."

Working mainly from
imagination and memory this “social artist,” through his painting, drawing and
mixed media work, explores the suffering of Iraqi’s political prisoners,
the calamity of war, Kurdish marginalization, the oppression of women, and the
ravages of child labor. As he told the Cairo Times in 2004 "I
am engaged in my society and as an artist, I want to express my pain about what
is happening. I want to see my society live a normal life where the citizen is
respected,"

Of particular concern to Sahi
is the conflation of church and state. As he has explained "The
religious men support the military because their interests are the same. Together
they stand against democracy and development."

But Sahi’s work isn't all doom and gloom; there is an optimistic
aspect about his work. In his current exhibition at the Meem Gallery in Dubai
he presents vividly colored paintings of individuals and group portraits that
are ostensibly harmonious scenes of leisure. Sahi also expresses his love of music in his
work. "I should like to produce paintings
like pieces of Arab poetry or Arab music on the oud or the qanun,"he wrote in an
exhibition brochure.

With exhibitions, over the years, in the Middle East, North Africa, the UK, Europe and the
USA, Sahi’s heart still yearns for the country of his birth. As he says "Even
though I have lived for years outside Iraq, I am still Iraqi, in my behavior,
my culture, in what I eat, what I drink, when I talk with people-even in
love,"

As a child,
Indonesian artist Entang
Wiharso led a life of flux as his family moved around the Indonesian
island of Java. As he told the
Artling “When I was a kid, my
parents always moved us around, which was not normal for an Indonesian at all.
I lived in a village where everyone stayed in the same place, then we moved to
different cities. I didn’t feel like a normal kid, but it was a good
experience.”

It is an
experience he continues to live with studios & residences in Yogyakarta
& Rhode Island producing his expressionistic, surreal works all interwoven
with traditional storytelling. Covering a range of mediums from relief
sculptures to painting from installation to video, Wiharso’s works encompass Indonesian and Western folklore and
literature, contemporary culture, and current events.

As he said in conversation
with ArtAsiaPacific’s,
Ashley Bickerton “The Dutch colonizers were very aware of how to claim
ownership of the land. They photographed and painted the Indonesian landscape
and sent the images around the world: “This is ours, we own this.” When I saw
such images – exotic depictions of harmonious, idealized tropical landscape,
dotted with villages and fauna – I wanted to take it back and make it Indonesian
again.”

It is a desire Wiharso
has actualized remarkably well, representing Indonesia in two Biennales (Venice
and Prague) and exhibitions in Singapore, Japan, Rome and now New York. In
regard to his 2015 New York exhibition at the Marc Straus Gallery, the New
York Times art critic Ken Johnson said about the installation, Inheritance (see below) “It’s a very postmodern tableau, but it has the
mystery, too, of an old folk tale.”

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Many years working in front of the camera has given Dutch/American
photographer Micky Hoogendijk the
empathy necessary to get the emotional content from her models that her
portraits demand. As she told The Austin American Statesman’s Michael Barnes “I
coax trust, contact and vulnerability from my subjects in order to produce an
image from which the viewer can then create his own world.”

Growing up in an artistic environment, her father was photographer/painter
and her mother was an interior designer, Hoogendijk married the Dutch artist Rob Scholte in her 20’s and
ran the business side of his practice. After they separated she took up
modeling and acting. A role in the prime time Dutch soap opera Good times,
bad times brought
her local fame. About which she has said “I played a bitchy character, five
days a week for two years.”

After moving to Hollywood she played a make-up trailer model in Garry
Marshall’s 2004 romantic comedy Raising Helen. In 2008 the New
York International Independent Film & Video Festival gave Hoogendijk the Best Actress award for her
role in the independent drama Blindspot.

Hoogendijk’s switch to the other
side of the camera happened the following year. Her mother gave her a
professional quality camera and Hoogendijk took to the streets of Austin,
Texas. As she has said “I took pictures out on the street. Took pictures of
architecture, lines, homeless people. I was able to walk around and be the
voyeur. I had been so famous in Holland. This changed my life. Made me a better
person.”

After initial encouragement from a local collector which combined
with the limitation of only one lens for her camera, Hoogendijk began to
utilize her knowledge from in front of the camera to take studio based
portraits. “I allow my model’s instinct and personality to melt together with
my camera and drive my creative inspiration,” she says. Working with actors “interesting
people who don’t mind getting naked,” she elaborates, Hoogendijk explores
themes based upon religion, society and mythology.

And as Designer-Vintage.com’sKarin Barnhoornwrote
in 2013, “(it’s) A dynamic and inspiring
realm where visual arts, technology and theater melt together into photography.
We’re talking Dutch artistic roots here.”

Hoogendijk’s exhibition The Other Side of
Fear is Freedom is
currently on show at Amsterdam’s Eduard
Planting Gallery until the 7th of March.

Billy
Childish (Stephen
John Hamper) has a large collection of hats which is very befitting
for this man who wears so many, although one suspects you would be hard pressed
to find a silk top hat in his collection; it’s just not his thing.

An Enfant terrible who has never grown up, Childish
revels in the contradictions life has to offer making a career of not having a
career. He has a laundry list of activities to his credit that includes but is
not limited to; poet, novelist, publisher, musician, producer, painter,
photographer, film maker and activist. And he is as prolific as he is varied; to
which 127 music albums, over 40 publications of collected poetry and the 600
drawings he produced in six months whilst working as an apprentice stone mason
all attest.

An individualist with an anti-establishment streak, Childish
has lived and worked all his life in the South East English town of Chatham which has seen him labeled as a provincial outsider,
a categorization he rejects. As he told the Guardian
newspaper"I never needed to
validate myself by moving to London. In my mind, it's actually a very
provincial place because it's full of people from the provinces trying not to
seem provincial. I always found it very limiting."

Whilst his
paintings are often shown in museums, Childish doesn’t have a very high opinion
of them. As he told The White
Review“A
library or a gallery should be empty to a degree. It should have elbow room. It
should have calmness. It should be a statement about who we are, not a
statement about populist culture. Real culture isn’t very popular. Real art
isn’t that popular. These would be my arguments with places like the Tate when
they say they are bringing challenging work to ordinary people. If it was
challenging the place would be empty. If you challenge people they get the hump
and clear off. The Tate is populist: it’s a day out. That’s not necessarily bad,
but we’ve already got places for a day out. You don’t have to make everything
into a fucking knees-up.”

From his expulsion from the Saint
Martin's School of Art in 1982 for obscenity and other assorted crimes to his
being awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts Degree
from the University of Kent in 2014, Childish just goes about his
business. As he says “I've got things to be
getting on with."

A selection of
his work can be seen in the exhibition The Islanders which he shares with Tom Anholt,
Ryan Mosley and Rose Wylie at Copenhagen’s Galerie
Mikael Andersenuntil the 21st of February.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Sir Peter Paul Rubens
was a man of sensual appetites with a discerning eye for detail. A painter and a
diplomat, who excelled at both, Rubens, traversed the European stage from
Holland to Italy, from England to Spain, during the turbulent first half of
the 17th Century.

The most celebrated
artist of his day, Rubens was the confidant of Kings and Queens; he not only
painted their portraits but conducted clandestine affairs of state on their behalf. And
what better cover for the covert diplomat than a commission to depict the grandeur
of one endowed by God to rule.

Flattery was the
order of the day and Rubens obliged. But amongst the extravagant drama of the luscious
color, the interplay of light and dark, the lively brush strokes, all hallmarks
of the Baroque style of the time, are details that go unnoticed by a superficial
glance. Such as in The Entombment (see above) the parentheses formed by the
bleeding wound and mouth of lifeless Christ, around which painting pivots, encapsulates
a meditation on the idea that underpins the Eucharist; a central tenant of Rubens' Catholic faith.

The skill of the
diplomat in paint, as it is the detail in the agreement that cements its applicability, so it is the pathos in the painting that holds the interest.
In 1629, the 52 year old Rubens was at Philip IV Spanish court when England’s
Charles I commissioned Rubens to decorate the ceiling of a new banquet hall in
his Whitehall palace. Whilst executing the commission Rubens secretly negotiated a peace
agreement between the two countries. So pleased were the kings that each
bestowed a knighthood upon him.

And then of course there are
Rubens’ nudes, his rubenesque ladies. About which he is reported to have said “I paint a woman's big rounded buttocks
so that I want to reach out and stroke the dimpled flesh.” But not all
his ladies were BBW, like Marie de Medici, the wife of France's Henry IV, who Rubens painted 24 times; she was never more than a size 10. As Rubens said about his
models “Painting a
young maiden is similar to cavorting with great abandon. It is the finest
refreshment.”

Rubens died from heart failure at the age of 63, said to be
brought on by his chronic gout, “the rich man’s disease” caused by the overindulgence
of food and wine. Interestingly Ruben’s youngest child was born eight months
after his death.

A
selection of Rubens’ works along with artists he has influenced is currently on
show at London’s Royal
Academy of Arts until the 10th of April.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

On Thursday the 23rd of January the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced
that they had moved their iconic Doomsday Clock to three minutes to
Midnight. Citing the modernization of nuclear arsenals and unchecked climate change this
is the closest the clock has been to midnight since the height of the Cold War
in 1984.

Should these apocalyptic
scenarios come together silicon may replace carbon as the dominate life form assuming
of course that silicon could survive the ravages of a nuclear winter and/or an overheated
world. In this hypothetical situation the question that arises is how would art
be appreciated, as a graphical representation or would the language/code of its
production dominate?

Indirectly,
the work of minimalist British artist, David Riley
nods towards these imaginings. Whilst his real world exhibitions present his
work in a conventional manner that can be hung upon a wall his internet
exhibitions whilst having a graphical representation on a monitor depend upon their
underlying codes for that reality.

Traveling the
internet under the pseudonym of Revad, Riley uses social media pages for his
internet exhibitions. His word circle numbers tumbler exhibition can be seen here and his colourscape
exhibition on instagram can be seen here.

When he talks about his work Riley refers to himself as a
black box and his work as outputs. As he explains on his website “when I chose
the black box metaphor I was thinking like an engineer. In science and
engineering, a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed
solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics; and without
any knowledge of its internal working. Using this well understood concept, I
think I am (in) the black box. That is, I receive stimuli to make work; I apply
my interest, experience and passion to making the work; I produce output and
share the output I find satisfying.”

Prior to becoming an artist, Riley was a senior systems engineer for a
telecommunications company who played with photography. It was this photographic
interest that caused him to take up art. As he explained via email “The digital
camera was the catalyst. I had dabbled in photography for many years, but hated
the wait for film processing and printing. The digital camera streamlined the
process and gave me instant access to the material. I then realized I could do
much more than take photographs. Having made this personal breakthrough, I
started to explore other materials.”

Amongst
those other materials of interest was language or as he prefers to call it code
and its graphical representation. And should the unthinkable happen and silicon
does indeed triumph over carbon, Riley’s work, be it graphic or code, may well
become the equivalent of Lascaux
in that new epoch.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

A not unfounded
compliant for the young American painter Jackson Pollock to shout
into the night air about the colossus of 20th Century art as he
staggered home, drunk again. To which he would add "I'll show them someday,"which
he ultimately did do. For Picasso had covered and excelled at many forms of
artistic expression, even inventing his own. But the Spanish master left one
area untouched – action painting.

In the
early years after the Second World War, Pollock was living in New York and
making a name for himself in the New York art scene. He was also undergoing Jungian
psychotherapy for alcoholism and depression, a treatment predicated
on self discovery. In 1946, along with his wife Lee Krasner, Pollock moved
from the city to a homestead in a rural hamlet near East Hampton. On the
property was a barn that Pollock converted into a studio which saw him produce the
majority of his formidable works.

Pollock would circumnavigate a canvas he had affixed to the
floor upon which he would fling, drip and squirt paint. The traditional easel
and brushes of his trade were left aside as he went on these journeys of self
discovery. About which Pollock wrote “When I aminmy painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only
after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I
have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the
painting has a life of its own.“

It was
a performance, often with more than one act, which left a permanent record. As
photographer Hans Namuth explained “A dripping wet canvas covered the entire
floor … There was complete silence … Pollock looked at the painting. Then,
unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the
canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His
movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he
flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely
forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the
camera shutter … My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting,
perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one
keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'”

Whilst Time
Magazine famously called Pollock “Jack the Dripper,” his contemporary Willem de Kooning said "Every so often a painter has to
destroy painting. Cézanne did it. Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did
it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new
paintings again."

A current
exhibition of his work Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is on show at Tate
Liverpool until the 18thof October.After its British showing,
the exhibition will move to theDallas Museum of Art where it will be on show from
the 15th of November to the 20th of March next year.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Since its invention in the middle of
the 19th Century the photograph has become a competitor to and a
collaborator with painting. For in essence they are the two sides of the same coin:
the visual expression of an idea and other places of interest. And whilst the relatively
new kid on the block has yet to reach the gravitas of its older sister in the
eyes of some, increasingly artists have incorporated both into their work.

One such artist is Frenchman Philippe Cognée
who uses photographs, video stills, and found images from the internet in
general and the satellite images from Google’s street views in particular as
the basis for his paintings. He renders these views using charcoal, graphite and
encaustic (paint mixed with Bee’s wax) which he then heats
and crushes with a domestic iron. The result, as the charcoal explodes, the
line breaks up and the paint melts is a semi abstract depiction of the scene.

Utilizing subject matter that covers the whole gamut
of traditional painting genres from still life’s to landscapes, both urban and
rural, from portraiture to copy’s of old maters Cognée
explores the role of painting in the 21st Century.

The transitory
nature of the digital world, best encapsulated in the 24 hour news cycle or the
five to ten minute life of the average twitter message, is investigated in Cognée’s
work through his vague renderings that demand the viewer’s input from their
memories, real or imagined. The right or wrong of accuracy is abandoned for the
momentary now that each member of the audience, prejudices intact, brings to
the encounter.

Cognée’s current exhibition Territoiresis
on show at Brussels’Galerie
Daniel Templon until the 21st of February.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

In 1995 three researchers from Keio
University, Shigeru
Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto and Masumi Wakita won the Ig Nobel Prize for Psychology for teaching pigeons to
discriminate between impressionist and cubist paintings using the works of Claude
Monet and Pablo Picasso. Interestingly, when the paintings were shown to the
birds upside down they could only identify the cubist works.

The Dutch/American artist Anton
van Dalen is a
pigeon fancier. Each day, weather permitting, he goes to the roof of the
building he has called home for the last 47 years and releases his birds from
their loft to fly in the sky over Manhattan’s East Village. What was once a
common sight has become increasingly rare as this Manhattan enclave has
suffered from the advance of gentrification.

The change wrought over the last
four decades to his beloved East Village along with his fascination with animal
intelligence of both the winged kind as well as the human kind has long
informed his work. Presented in a graphic reportage style it betrays the
influence of the New Yorker’s cartoonist and illustrator Saul
Steinbergfor whom van Dalen was his main assistant for 30
years.

From the seedy streets with theirdrug-shooting galleries to the upscale
bars, fast food restaurants, and well-heeled women van Dalen’s work is
infused with the pessimism of the realist but soften with a dry wit as he
explores his character’s ability to survive in an environment of restricted
behavior. Over time van Dalen’s palette has shift from the monochromatic style
of his earlier works to what he calls “the colors of
our time,” a mimicking of the light from
flat screens, cell phones and computers.

An exhibition of van Dalen’s latest works will open at
New York’s PPOW
Gallery on the 13 of February and be on show until the 14th of
March.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

African American artist Romare Bearden was a man of many
parts. He was a social worker, a student of philosophy, a jazz musician and
composer, a writer, and an artist. In the latter years of his life he was
awarded honorary doctorates by seven American universities in the fields of
Fine Art and Literature.

His first forays into art were as a cartoonist for satirical
student publications on the campuses where he was studying for a degree in Education.
After graduation, whilst studying at New York’s Arts Students league his
political cartoons were published in African/American newspapers.

He enjoyed early success with his painting but as abstract
expressionism took hold this dwindled and a disillusioned Bearden decamped to
Paris to study art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. Whilst there he met
and became friends with Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Constantin Brancusi.

His return to America saw him concentrate more on his music
that his art although he experimented with abstraction. It was in the early 1960's that Bearden truly found his artistic voice.

Inspired by Picasso’s earlier work with collage and Matisse’s
later cut outs, Bearden found the perfect way to express his ideas. Through
the use of collage he was able to articulate the Negro experience from both the
rural south and the urban north that he had lived. As he said ''I believe that it was because I had something unique
to say about the life that I knew best. I took an art form that was different.
What I had to say took a little different form than most of the paintings
around; I used the collage. Especially in some of the earlier collages that I
did, I chose some of the photographic materials for a certain reason. I wanted
to give an immediacy, like a documentary movie.''

Bearden’s use of collage underscored his belief that when
things are taken out of their usual context, reworked and reconfigured in a new
context they develop new meanings. “When some things are taken out of the usual
context and put in the new, they are given an entirely new character."
He once explained.

Bearden today is regarded as America’s master of collage, a discipline
that, like his life, is made of many parts. “The artist has to be something
like the whale,” he once said “swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing
everything until he has what he needs.”

The High
Museum of Art in Atlanta currently has A Painter's Profile: The High Celebrates Romare Beardenon show until the 31st of May. And
New York’s Columbia University Wallach
Art Gallery is showing Romare Bearden: A Black Odysseyuntil 14th of March.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

In the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness
Will Smith’s character Chris Gardner secures an interview for the job that will
change his life by solving a Rubik’s Cube for the potential employer’s recruiter
during a shared taxi ride. In 1974 the “cube”, the solving of which is often
equated with intelligence, was invented by a Hungarian Professor of
architecture, Erno Rubik,
primarily to explain to his students spatial relationships. Six years later it
was on its way to becoming the most popular toy in history.

About his cube, Rubik told CNN “probably
the most characteristic part of the cube is the contradiction between
simplicity and complexity. I think probably that's part of the key to the
success of the cube -- you are able to have a connection with this order and
chaos.”

It is a situation that is not dissimilar
to what is happening in Chinese art according to Arne Glimcher, the number
three art dealer in Forbes Magazine’s top ten. As he told the Phaidon
Press website in 2012 “The Cultural Revolution destroyed the entire
history of China for a generation. So you’re dealing with the oldest country in
the world and the newest country in the world and that schism between who they
were and who they are and that is happening in China.”

Enter to this milieu Chinese
conceptional artist Zhao Yao. Using painting
rather than installation to express his ideas, Zhao is “no longer concerned with making something
that is simply interesting in itself.” As he says about his paintings “They are informed by observations of
what others are looking at, and how they are looking.”

As Zhao
explained to Time Out,
Beijing “These pictures are imaginative. At the same time they are ready-made,
taken from a series used to train kids to think logically; things like color
patterns and exercises to teach them to move shapes around and form a new
design. By integrating these lessons with the mass-produced cloth, these appear
as abstract works of art.”

To which he
added “‘I like it more when the audience doesn’t trust the artist’s
perspective, when the artist doesn’t trust himself and when the audience
doesn’t even trust itself.” With a final proviso “Don’t trust me; don’t trust
anything.”

His current
exhibition Zhao Yao: Painting of Thought
is on show at Hong Kong’s Pace
Gallery from the 15 of January to the 26th of February.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Whether as the quantifier for time or as the commodity that
keeps the earth spinning, money has a major effect on our quality of life. This
is particularly true in the visual arts where an artist’s success/importance is
increasingly measured by the number of marks, yen or dollars they can command
for their work, especially at public auctions. It is equally true that a lack of
money is one of the modern world’s great motivators.

Such was the case for the German/American engineer Otis Kaye. He was financially
wiped out when the Great Depression of 1929 crashed over him. Kaye’s response
to this calamity was to take up painting and the subject he most often chose to
paint was money. The precision inherent in his early calling was such that his depictions
of dollars and cents are so accurate and realistic that even today viewers
of his work are often tempted to try and pocket them from his canvas.

Little is known about the man mainly because he never
exhibited his work. To have done so would have brought the wrath of the US
government down upon his head. For in 1909 it became illegal to paint US
currency. Consequently Kaye gave his paintings to friends and relatives and
whilst he did depict other subjects he is believed to have sold only two
paintings during his life time.

Best known for his technical virtuosity, Kaye’s compositions
are as intriguing as they are inventive and he was not adverse to the visual pun,
although his humor is often black and barely conceals the anger he felt towards
the hand fate had dealt him.

Last Saturday Connecticut’s New
Britain Museum of American Art opened an exhibition of his work, Otis Kaye: Money, Mystery, and Mastery which will remain on
show until the 10 of May.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Three days after the horrific experience of seeing airplanes flying
into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center a life affirming
mural The Return of Spring was
unveiled at the Times Square subway station. It is a modern day depiction of
the Greek myth of Persephone whose return to earth from Hades each year heralds
the end of winter; a metaphorical victory of life over death. The 7 by 20 foot
(2.1 by 6 meter) glass mosaic work was created by the American social realist artist Jack Beal.

After three years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Beal
entered a world where abstract expressionism was all the rage. It was a style
that Beal was neither comfortable with nor exceptional at and after flirting
with figurative art he settled into the social realist genre. It was a
courageous move, for as the New York Times art critic, Hilton Kramer wrote “Given the generally
low esteem — a disfavor bordering at times on contempt — that the Social
Realist impulse has suffered in recent decades, this is not a position likely
to be a cause of envy.”

The Columbus Museum’s
curator, Les Reker has said Beal, ”borrowed the bold lines and the sharp colors
of abstract expressionism and slathered them into the figures and objects of
traditional realism.”

Ever the optimist,
Beal painted his still life’s, landscapes and figurative studies from an everyday
point of view. As he said in a 1979 interview “I think that what we have to try
to do is to make beautiful paintings about life as we live it.”

Author Eric
Shanes in a monograph about Beal wrote, his “pushing of representational forms
to their interface with abstraction has been responsible for the creation of
the most striking and unusual images of the period.”

The exhibition Jack Beal: Hard Edge Paintings, 1968 -1972
is currently on show at New York’s George
Adams Gallery until the 28th of February.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Freedom of Speech is a basic human right enshrined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights which has been central to numerous
debates, often in the vanguard, about the social conditions under which we
conduct our affairs.

Twenty five years ago Robert Mapplethorpe’s
exhibition The Perfect Moment created
a cultural convulsion that saw the first American museum to be charged with obscenity,
another museum’s director resign, a serve backlash directed at the American government’s
arts funding agency the National Endowment for the Arts and a tripling in the
prices for Mapplethorpe’s photographic prints. Of the over 150 photographs in
the exhibition 7 were considered offensive, 5 explicit homoerotic S&M
images and 2 images of naked juveniles.

What had been a major success at New York’s Whitney Museum was
considered beyond the pale for showing at the Cincinnati’s
Contemporary Art Center. Whilst Cincinnati is not New York, it took the
Cincinnati jury just 2 hours of discussion to decide there was no case to
answer.

A lifelong catholic, Mapplethorpe’s rigorously
formalized portraits and figure studies, floral still life’s and photographs of
gayeroticism were an expression
of his faith. As his lover, the academic and cultural writer Jack Fritscher says in his essay
What Happened When: Censorship, Gay History, & Mapplethorpe,
“Though Mapplethorpe was for a long-time non-practicing, he was a life-long
Catholic as was his intimate peer, Andy Warhol. Both were very much influenced
by western culture's Catholic-identified sculpture and painting. Mapplethorpe
died a Catholic, and his photographs which he designed, he said, as
"little altars" fall distinctly in matter and form within Catholic
traditions of incarnation (his faces), transubstantiation (his flowers),
martyrdom (his figures), mysticism (his fetishes), and ritual (his formalism).”

In 2011 the Sean Kelly Gallery
hosted a posthumous exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work, 50 Americans. Fifty people, one from each American state, were
invited to select a single artwork from over 2,000 images in Mapplethorpe’s
oeuvre.

About this exhibition Vanity Fair contributing
editor, Ingrid Sischysaid “I was fascinated by how few of the
graphically sexual images were ultimately chosen. It speaks to the beauty of
Robert’s other images; it shows this is not a one-note-Johnny photographer, and
that his camera certainly traveled in a number of subjects. Many of these other
images, like his flowers or images of Patti Smith, or his classical nudes or
his portraits of black and white men together, actually have an undercurrent of
the sexual component that made him famous.” Whilst photographer, Bruce Weber said “Isn’t it
a wonderful miracle that photography can express what was in Robert
Mapplethorpe’s head, and be accepted today as an American point of view.”

Friday, January 16, 2015

The announcement of the
demise of this particular European imperialist demigod in Conrad’s 1899 novella
could also be considered a prescient announcement of the upheavals that would
engulf the world as people struggled out from under the yoke of European colonialism
be they African, Arab or Asian.

It is an influence that
informs the work of American artist, Kehinde Wiley to a degree, for he is equally
interested in the craft of painting and how that effects a viewer’s perception.
As he told Bad at
Sports in 2010, “Certainly it’s a
question about colonialism, empire, race, and all of that. But let’s bring it
back a couple steps. Let’s talk about the artist’s desire to go beyond the
pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract—the
idea that painting can go beyond what is seen.”

Growing up in South Central Los
Angeles his mother was insistent the he attend art school. About which Wiley
has said “I was fortunate because my mother
was very much focused on getting me, my twin brother, and other siblings out of
the hood. On weekends I would go to art classes at a conservatory. After
school, we were on lockdown. It was something I hated, obviously, but in the
end it was a lifesaver.”

Described as a “brilliant renaissance technician with
hip-hop subject matter,” Wiley came to the attention of the art world in
his mid 20’s with a series of paintings depicting people from his New York neighborhood.
They are dressed in the uniform of the streets in poses they selected from classic
European portraiture which Wiley place on a decorative background. As he
told the Interview
website, “When Ice-T came by, he wanted to be this really great painting of
Napoleon by Ingres.”

In his latest
series of works, The World Stage, Wiley has broadened his outlook to include
people from a wider diaspora than New York. About which he says, “Many of the reasons why I choose certain sites have to do
with a level of curiosity, but it also has to do with their broader, global,
political importance- strategically for America, and the world community at
large. One of the reasons I chose Brazil, Nigeria, India and China is that
these are all the points of anxiety and curiosity and production that are going
on in the world that are changing the way we see empire.”

The Brooklyn
Museum has scheduled to show Wiley’s exhibition A New Republic from
the 20th of February to the 24th of May.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

The Hawaiian born painter
and sculptor Micah Ganske
makes paintings that look like digital prints and creates sculptures using a 3D
printer, which given his subject matter is entirely appropriate.

About his painting the Deitch Projects
website says “Ganske has spent his
career developing a method of stain painting that is unlike anything being done
in the art world today. Somewhere between Morris Lewis and batik
fabric painting, the method of paint application can be so invisible that his
brush-applied, acrylic on muslin paintings, are often initially mistaken as
ink-jet prints.”

“My
sculptures are designed digitally and produced using a MakerBot 3D printer,” he
says. Ganske has also released a selection of his sculptural designs on the Thingiverse website
for DIYers with a 3D printer to print their own versions under a Creative
Commons licence.

Ganske’s works look to the future albeit with a realist
rational of what has been before but rendered in a manicured optimistic aesthetic.
As he says about his work “I want to make work which inspires and engages the
viewer in what I truly believe is important and what drives me. I believe in
space exploration and the pursuit of technology as the vehicle to the future.
There will be bumps along the way, because we are flawed. Some advanced
technology will be used irresponsibly or simply for evil. However, the
progression of science and technology also represents the evolution of our
species. We are the first species just smart enough to evolve ourselves outside
of natural selection and Darwinian evolution.

A
selection of his latest work will have its first West Coast showing at Los
Angeles’ 101/EXHIBIT
gallery. The Future is Always Tomorrow opens on the
17 of January and will remain on display until the 7th of March.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.